News and information on hunting, archery and fishing in South and Central Texas. Boating, lake level and river level information provided for Braunig Lake, Lake Calaveras, Canyon Lake, Medina Lake and others. Whitetail deer and turkey season information and tips.

Is This Bullet Accurate? It Is. Are You?

Share this:

One of the questions I am most often asked is, is such and such a bullet accurate? To which I invariably reply, “Accurate enough for what?” It’s a relative term. If you want to shoot in competition, you need a different order of accuracy than is required in a hunting rifle. The easy answer is, I don’t know of any bullets, hunting or target, that aren’t accurate, except for what’s in some of the cheap military ammo, which is loaded with industrial waste and possibly a pinch of cat crap.

Competition bullets don’t have to expand or penetrate, they just have to get into the same hole as the previous bullet. Their construction, while requiring great precision and ruthless quality control, is much simpler than that of a hunting bullet, which has to expand and penetrate both, and getting a slug to do this involves complications. The Swift A-Frame, for example, has two cores, not one, and they’re bonded to the bullet’s jacket to keep everything together. Two cores doubles the chance for an error in manufacture, but since A-Frames are made in small numbers with people constantly keeping track of what’s going on, they shoot just fine. If you go to Africa and would like to see your PH smile, tell him you’re shooting A-Frames.

I’ve been solemnly assured on many occasions that a particular bullet won’t shoot. Almost always, this means the complainant tried the bullet in factory ammo in his rifle and it didn’t produce. If he had the wits to shoot that same slug in another rifle, or handload and try it out with different powders and charges, he would change his tune pretty damned quickly.

Don’t worry whether your bullet is accurate. It is. The question should be, how accurate are you?